By William Fisher
The juxtaposition of oil, human rights, and the "global war on terror" has exposed a giant fault line in the Bush Administration's foreign policy, revealing inconsistency and hypocrisy.
In his second inaugural address, the president pledged to make spreading freedom around the world the cornerstone of U.S. international relations. America would no longer tolerate its cozy relationships with dictatorial and repressive governments. We would stop supporting regimes that consistently showed up on the State Department's annual list of human rights violators.
After the scandals of Abu Ghraib, Bagram, and Guantanamo Bay, it was never going to be easy for the U.S. to maintain any credibility for its freedom agenda. But some of us continued to cling to a few hopeful signs; for example, the Administration's arm-twisting of Egypt's aging dictator, Hosni Mubarak, to open its presidential elections to multiple candidates.
For twenty-five years, Egypt remained second only to Israel as a recipient of U.S. military and economic assistance, while its Emergency Law made a mockery of due process and freedom of association and expression. Now we would no longer give Mubarak his usual "get out of jail" free pass. Now we would attach strings to our massive largesse.
So Egypt mollified us with a kind of faux presidential election, albeit it deeply flawed by placing impossible limitations on who could challenge the Mubarak regime at the polls. And the leading opposition figure, Ayman Nour, ended up in jail.
That was followed by a Parliamentary election that was rife with vote-rigging, disenfranchisement, violent attacks on voters and peaceful protesters, and the arrest of hundreds of Egyptian citizens. Despite flagrant police interference, the banned Muslim Brotherhood - the Middle East's poster child for political Islam - managed to win 88 seats in Parliament.
Judges who called on the government to allow them to conduct an inquiry into election irregularities were stripped of their judicial immunity, opening the possibility that they could be questioned by police, arrested, and tried.
The U.S. reaction to this Egyptian "democracy" charade was the equivalent of a mild slap on the wrist. The State Department expressed its "disappointment."
It had the same reaction last week, when Mubarak pushed through a two-year extension of the 25-year-old Emergency Law, despite his pledge to repeal it in favor of anti-terror legislation.
Egypt first adopted this draconian law in 1981 in response to the assassination of President Anwar Sadat, and at its height it was used to detain more than 30,000 prisoners indefinitely without charge. Mr. Mubarak has had the law renewed every three years since - and today human rights groups estimate that there are approximately 15,000 uncharged prisoners in Egypt's jails.
The law expressly allows the authorities to hold individuals for months without being charged or tried. But in practice, legal experts say, the government goes through the motions of technically releasing prisoners and then re-arresting them, without ever having actually let them go.
In effect, the law is the fire blanket the government has thrown over all dissent, including press freedom.
Said a State Department spokesman in response to a reporter's question at the very end of a press briefing last week: "It's a disappointment. It's a disappointment. We understand that Egypt has certainly facing its own issues related to terrorism, but President Mubarak during the presidential campaign had talked about the fact that he was going to seek a new emergency law, but one that would be targeted specifically at fighting terrorism, counterterrorism, and that would take into account respect for freedom of speech as well as human rights. Certainly we would like to see President Mubarak and his government follow through on that pledge."
What has happened here is that President Bush's pledge to rein in support for dictators has been trumped by two other strategic considerations: rewarding those countries who are U.S. allies in the "Global War on Terror" and romancing other countries that have oil and gas resources, despite their outrageous human rights records.
The list of U.S. allies in the "Global War on Terror" could well be headed, "The Coalition of the Despots." The democracy-spreader in the White House seems all too willing to overlook the long histories of repression, autocracy and human rights violations of such countries as Egypt, Yemen, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Sudan, Jordan - even Syria, which U.S. officials have recently begun praising for its efforts to keep terrorists out of Iraq.
Clearly the U.S. and other like-minded countries need to do whatever is likely to reduce threats of terrorism. But the Administration has apparently concluded that hunting down the bad guys - no matter by what methods -- has a higher priority than working to create the transparency and good governance practices that, ironically, might just help to kill jihadism at its poisonous roots.
More recently, as Iran is seen as a gathering threat and the insatiable
oil-appetites of fast-growing economies like China and India put pressure on the world's energy supplies, the Bush Administration has begun its delicate minuet with energy-rich states.
And so access to oil and gas becomes another issue that apparently trumps respect for democratic rule of law - and another sorry substitute for an energy policy that could curb America's addiction to oil by developing non-fossil energy sources.
America's partners in this new minuet include such pillars of democracy as Azerbaijan, one the most corrupt countries in the world, and Equatorial Guinea, whose dictatorial president, Teodoro Obiang Nguema, was recently praised by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
And Vice President Cheney will soon visit oil-rich Kazakhstan, whose president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, has long been a poster child for repression and corruption.
As my colleague Jim Lobe wrote recently, "Give Me That Old-Time Geo-Politics" is becoming a Bush Administration theme song.
But what makes these gaping policy contradictions so bizarre is not their geo-politics. It is the stark contrast between what America says and what America does. When our president vowed to spread freedom throughout the world, we might have thought him too idealistic, but we applauded - and we expected him to do what he promised.
Sadly, he seems to be giving up the good fight.
Wednesday, May 03, 2006
Tuesday, May 02, 2006
SPINNING OUR FORGOTTEN WAR
By William Fisher
“Contractors in Afghanistan are making big money for bad work.”
This is the conclusion reached in a new report from CorpWatch written by an Afghan-American journalist who returned to her native country to examine the progress of reconstruction.
“The Bush Administration touts the reconstruction effort in Afghanistan as a success story,” the report says, and claims that reconstruction has been “bungled” by “many of the same politically connected corporations which are doing similar work in Iraq”, receiving “massive open-ended contracts” without competitive bidding or with limited competition.
“These companies are pocketing millions, and leaving behind a people increasingly frustrated and angry with the results,” the report says. Foreign contractors “make as much as $1,000 a day, while the Afghans they employ make $5 per day,” the report charges.
Examples cited in the report by Fariba Nawa:
“A highway that begins crumbling before it is finished. A school with a collapsed roof. A clinic with faulty plumbing. A farmers’ cooperative that farmers can’t use. Afghan police and military that, after training, are incapable of providing the most basic security.”
Ms. Nawa says such examples abound in the country.
She writes, “Near Kabul City in the village of Qalai Qazi, Afghanistan, stands a new, bright-yellow health clinic built by American contractor The Louis Berger Group. The clinic was meant to function as a sterling example of American engineering, and to serve as a model for 81 clinics Berger was hired to build—in addition to roads, dams, schools and other infrastructure—in exchange for the $665 million in American aid money the company has so far received in federal contracts.
“The problem is, this ‘model’ clinic was falling apart: The ceiling had rotted away in patches; the plumbing, when it worked, leaked and shuddered; the chimney, made of flimsy metal, threatened to set the roof on fire; the sinks had no running water; and the place smelled of sewage,” the report says.
The U.S.-led reconstruction effort has directed substantial resources toward eradicating illicit poppy growing. It awarded a contract worth $120 million over four years to train opium growers in cultivation of alternative crops.
One part of the program “instructed farmers in Parwan to grow more vegetables, and promised to find buyers for them both within the country and beyond. The farmers, who normally planted beans and lentils, grew green vegetables as encouraged. But instead of profiting, they lost money. Vegetables flooded the market and drove the price down,” the report says.
In another part of the same program, the report says, it was determined that Afghan farmers, who make up about 80 percent of the working population, needed canals and irrigation systems and the means to get their product to domestic markets more efficiently, to minimize crop loss, and to reestablish their access to the international market.
The contractor’s solution was to build irrigation canals. But the reports points out that poppies need very little water or fertilizers to thrive. The result, the report says, was that opium poppy growers used the water in the canals to grow even more poppies.
The report says the U.S. hired a number of public relations companies to put a positive face on the reconstruction effort. One of them is the Washington, D.C.-based Rendon Group, which the report says has “close ties to the Bush Administration.” The Pentagon has awarded Rendon more than $56 million in contracts since September 11, 2001, “as part of a coordinated effort to disseminate positive press about America and its military in the developing world.”
The contracts call for “tracking foreign reporters” and “pushing (and sometimes paying) news outlets worldwide to run articles and segments favorable to United States interests.”
Rendon was also granted a contract in 2004 to train staff at President Karzai’s office in the art of public relations, and “later received another hefty grant of $3.9 million from the Pentagon to develop a counter-narcotics campaign with the Afghan interior ministry -- despite objections from Karzai and the State Department.”
The report charges that the contracting system used by international donors is broken. It says, “USAID gives contracts to American companies (and the World Bank and IMF give contracts to companies from their donor countries) who take huge chunks off the top and hire layers and layers of subcontractors who take their cuts, leaving only enough for sub-par construction. Quality assurance is minimal; contractors know well they can swoop in, put a new coat of paint on a rickety building, and submit their bill, with rarely a question asked. The result is collapsing hospitals, clinics, and schools, rutted and dangerous new highways, a “modernized” agricultural system that has actually left some farmers worse off than before, and emboldened militias and warlords who are more able to unleash violence on the people of Afghanistan.”
Afghans, the report says, “are losing their faith in the development experts whose job is to reconstruct and rebuild their country...What the people see is a handful of foreign companies setting priorities for reconstruction that make the companies wealthy, yet are sometimes absurdly contrary to what is necessary.”
Meanwhile, the report says, “the security situation in Afghanistan continues to deteriorate, directly threatening ongoing reconstruction. Some of the fighting is simply the result of deep frustration and distrust among Afghans who no longer believe the international community is looking out for their best interests.”
The “deliberate use of warlords and militias in reconstruction efforts has only lent them more credibility and power, further undermining the elected government and fueling a Taliban-led insurgency that continues to gain power.”
The basic infrastructure in the country, the report concludes, “is in shambles; the drug trade is booming. This result should be seen as a major setback to the ‘War on Terror.’ To Afghans, who after decades of war, believed they would finally catch a break, it’s a heartbreak.”
“Contractors in Afghanistan are making big money for bad work.”
This is the conclusion reached in a new report from CorpWatch written by an Afghan-American journalist who returned to her native country to examine the progress of reconstruction.
“The Bush Administration touts the reconstruction effort in Afghanistan as a success story,” the report says, and claims that reconstruction has been “bungled” by “many of the same politically connected corporations which are doing similar work in Iraq”, receiving “massive open-ended contracts” without competitive bidding or with limited competition.
“These companies are pocketing millions, and leaving behind a people increasingly frustrated and angry with the results,” the report says. Foreign contractors “make as much as $1,000 a day, while the Afghans they employ make $5 per day,” the report charges.
Examples cited in the report by Fariba Nawa:
“A highway that begins crumbling before it is finished. A school with a collapsed roof. A clinic with faulty plumbing. A farmers’ cooperative that farmers can’t use. Afghan police and military that, after training, are incapable of providing the most basic security.”
Ms. Nawa says such examples abound in the country.
She writes, “Near Kabul City in the village of Qalai Qazi, Afghanistan, stands a new, bright-yellow health clinic built by American contractor The Louis Berger Group. The clinic was meant to function as a sterling example of American engineering, and to serve as a model for 81 clinics Berger was hired to build—in addition to roads, dams, schools and other infrastructure—in exchange for the $665 million in American aid money the company has so far received in federal contracts.
“The problem is, this ‘model’ clinic was falling apart: The ceiling had rotted away in patches; the plumbing, when it worked, leaked and shuddered; the chimney, made of flimsy metal, threatened to set the roof on fire; the sinks had no running water; and the place smelled of sewage,” the report says.
The U.S.-led reconstruction effort has directed substantial resources toward eradicating illicit poppy growing. It awarded a contract worth $120 million over four years to train opium growers in cultivation of alternative crops.
One part of the program “instructed farmers in Parwan to grow more vegetables, and promised to find buyers for them both within the country and beyond. The farmers, who normally planted beans and lentils, grew green vegetables as encouraged. But instead of profiting, they lost money. Vegetables flooded the market and drove the price down,” the report says.
In another part of the same program, the report says, it was determined that Afghan farmers, who make up about 80 percent of the working population, needed canals and irrigation systems and the means to get their product to domestic markets more efficiently, to minimize crop loss, and to reestablish their access to the international market.
The contractor’s solution was to build irrigation canals. But the reports points out that poppies need very little water or fertilizers to thrive. The result, the report says, was that opium poppy growers used the water in the canals to grow even more poppies.
The report says the U.S. hired a number of public relations companies to put a positive face on the reconstruction effort. One of them is the Washington, D.C.-based Rendon Group, which the report says has “close ties to the Bush Administration.” The Pentagon has awarded Rendon more than $56 million in contracts since September 11, 2001, “as part of a coordinated effort to disseminate positive press about America and its military in the developing world.”
The contracts call for “tracking foreign reporters” and “pushing (and sometimes paying) news outlets worldwide to run articles and segments favorable to United States interests.”
Rendon was also granted a contract in 2004 to train staff at President Karzai’s office in the art of public relations, and “later received another hefty grant of $3.9 million from the Pentagon to develop a counter-narcotics campaign with the Afghan interior ministry -- despite objections from Karzai and the State Department.”
The report charges that the contracting system used by international donors is broken. It says, “USAID gives contracts to American companies (and the World Bank and IMF give contracts to companies from their donor countries) who take huge chunks off the top and hire layers and layers of subcontractors who take their cuts, leaving only enough for sub-par construction. Quality assurance is minimal; contractors know well they can swoop in, put a new coat of paint on a rickety building, and submit their bill, with rarely a question asked. The result is collapsing hospitals, clinics, and schools, rutted and dangerous new highways, a “modernized” agricultural system that has actually left some farmers worse off than before, and emboldened militias and warlords who are more able to unleash violence on the people of Afghanistan.”
Afghans, the report says, “are losing their faith in the development experts whose job is to reconstruct and rebuild their country...What the people see is a handful of foreign companies setting priorities for reconstruction that make the companies wealthy, yet are sometimes absurdly contrary to what is necessary.”
Meanwhile, the report says, “the security situation in Afghanistan continues to deteriorate, directly threatening ongoing reconstruction. Some of the fighting is simply the result of deep frustration and distrust among Afghans who no longer believe the international community is looking out for their best interests.”
The “deliberate use of warlords and militias in reconstruction efforts has only lent them more credibility and power, further undermining the elected government and fueling a Taliban-led insurgency that continues to gain power.”
The basic infrastructure in the country, the report concludes, “is in shambles; the drug trade is booming. This result should be seen as a major setback to the ‘War on Terror.’ To Afghans, who after decades of war, believed they would finally catch a break, it’s a heartbreak.”
AMERICAN BEDFELLOWS
By William Fisher
President George W. Bush’s “Global War on Terror” has produced the unintended consequence of bringing the United States ever-closer to some of the world’s most repressive regimes.
Egypt provides a classic example.
Last week, over the objections of the country’s human rights advocates, Egypt extended the 20-year-old “emergency” law that gives the government power to arrest and detain people without charges, and refused to moderate its campaign to further compromise the independence of an already weak judiciary.
These two developments provide insight into how the Global War on Terror is consistently trumping moves toward good governance and civil society that could be powerful weapons against the very terrorists Egypt seeks to defeat.
Following what many believe to be last year’s deeply flawed presidential election, the country’s judges’ demanded that they be allowed to investigate reports of widespread irregularities, violence towards voters and judges supervising the polls, and vote rigging. .
The government’s response was to strip six of the magistrates of their immunity from police questioning and thus open the door to criminal charges of defamation and insult.
Human rights organizations wrote Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif that they were “concerned for a number of human rights violations that took place with a renewed strength in the last months in Egypt, and, in particular, for the repeated limitations to freedom of expression and opinion, whose victims were different groups of the Egyptian civil society”.
The fate of the judges remains in limbo.
Egypt first adopted its Emergency Law in 1981 in response to the assassination of President Anwar Sadat, and at its height was used to detain more than 30,000
prisoners indefinitely without charge.
Mr. Mubarak has had the law renewed every three years since — and today human rights groups estimate that there are approximately 15,000 uncharged prisoners in Egypt's jails.
The law expressly allows the authorities to hold individuals for up to six
months without being charged or tried. But in practice, legal experts said, the
government goes through the motions of technically releasing prisoners after six
months, and then re-arresting them, without ever having actually let them go.
In effect, the law is the fire blanket the government has thrown over all dissent, including press freedom.
During his presidential campaign – the first in the country’s history that allowed multiple candidates -- President Mubarak vowed repeatedly to repeal the state of emergency in favor of a new anti-terrorism law. He received the enthusiastic support of civil society and human rights groups, journalists, lawyers, and other professional organizations, and even members of the political opposition.
A typical civil society response came from the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights and the Human Rights Association for the Assistance of Prisoners. They wrote the Prime Minister that they “consider the termination of the state of emergency by the Egyptian authorities as a step forward towards the respect of Human Rights in Egypt and the strengthening of democratic values in the country. The extension of the state of emergency in Egypt had has been the source of several violations of human rights, and was used by the authorities to repress political opponents and to severely limit the freedom of expression and association.”
The organizations also encouraged the government to consider the demands of the Egyptian Press Syndicate and to examine journalists’ demands for the reform of laws governing the press. In particular, the groups expressed concern about the clauses on defamation, “so as to decriminalize the press related offences in order to guarantee freedom of expression and democracy in the country”.
Two journalists were recently sentenced to a year of imprisonment and fines for “defamation”, and hundreds of similar cases are reportedly now before the courts.
But the organizations cautioned the Egyptian authorities “to ensure the conformity of the new legislation to their international obligations” with guarantees of the right to life, freedom of expression, religion and belief, prohibition of torture and any form of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, the right to a fair and impartial trial, guarantees on the presumption of innocence, arrest only in case of reasonable suspicion, as well as the obligation to communicate to the detainee the charges against him/her and the guarantee of access to a lawyer, absolute prohibition of torture in all circumstances and a legal definition of terrorism that does not leave ground for misinterpretation or abuse..”
The Egyptian president’s response was to push a two-year extension of the emergency law through Parliament. The two-year extension was widely supported by the majority of the members of parliament who belong to Mubarak's governing National Democratic Party, which voted 237 to 91 in favor.
The largest opposition block in Parliament includes 88 members of the Muslim Brotherhood who were elected as independents last year. They stood in the parliamentary chamber today wearing black sashes over their shoulders that called for an end to the emergency law. The once militant Brotherhood, while still officially banned, has become Egypt’s leading voice of political Islam.
We will never use the emergency law against the Egyptian people," Mr. Nazif
said to the crowded parliamentary chamber. "We will use it only to protect the
citizens and face the terror cells that did not quell until now."
The authorities promptly arrested several dozen young men from political
opposition groups who had been displaying signs reading, "No for emergency
law," and "Together against extension of the emergency law."
While the U.S. State Department expressed disappointment that the presidential and subsequent parliamentary elections were not as free and fair as hoped for, President Bush has praised Egypt for its staunch support for the Global War on Terror.
Today, Egypt remains second only to Israel as a beneficiary of U.S. military and economic assistance.
President Bush has also praised other countries that have long histories as human rights violators but that support his anti-terror campaign. These include Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Libya, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Yemen, and others.
These countries consistently receive negative assessments in the U.S. State Department’s annual review of human rights practices around the world.
In a second kind of alliance that appears to be contrary to President Bush’s goal of spreading democracy around the world, the Administration is now reaching out to leaders who rule oil-rich countries that are accused of authoritarian rule and human rights violations. This search for energy supplies and allies against Iran includes Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Equatorial Guinea.
So opaque is the Bush Administration that it’s difficult to know if it understands how its policies thus contradict one another. And how seriously these contradictions strain American credibility internationally. But these conflicting themes will not be lost on the rest of the world, most of whose countries will lose no time pointing them out.
President George W. Bush’s “Global War on Terror” has produced the unintended consequence of bringing the United States ever-closer to some of the world’s most repressive regimes.
Egypt provides a classic example.
Last week, over the objections of the country’s human rights advocates, Egypt extended the 20-year-old “emergency” law that gives the government power to arrest and detain people without charges, and refused to moderate its campaign to further compromise the independence of an already weak judiciary.
These two developments provide insight into how the Global War on Terror is consistently trumping moves toward good governance and civil society that could be powerful weapons against the very terrorists Egypt seeks to defeat.
Following what many believe to be last year’s deeply flawed presidential election, the country’s judges’ demanded that they be allowed to investigate reports of widespread irregularities, violence towards voters and judges supervising the polls, and vote rigging. .
The government’s response was to strip six of the magistrates of their immunity from police questioning and thus open the door to criminal charges of defamation and insult.
Human rights organizations wrote Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif that they were “concerned for a number of human rights violations that took place with a renewed strength in the last months in Egypt, and, in particular, for the repeated limitations to freedom of expression and opinion, whose victims were different groups of the Egyptian civil society”.
The fate of the judges remains in limbo.
Egypt first adopted its Emergency Law in 1981 in response to the assassination of President Anwar Sadat, and at its height was used to detain more than 30,000
prisoners indefinitely without charge.
Mr. Mubarak has had the law renewed every three years since — and today human rights groups estimate that there are approximately 15,000 uncharged prisoners in Egypt's jails.
The law expressly allows the authorities to hold individuals for up to six
months without being charged or tried. But in practice, legal experts said, the
government goes through the motions of technically releasing prisoners after six
months, and then re-arresting them, without ever having actually let them go.
In effect, the law is the fire blanket the government has thrown over all dissent, including press freedom.
During his presidential campaign – the first in the country’s history that allowed multiple candidates -- President Mubarak vowed repeatedly to repeal the state of emergency in favor of a new anti-terrorism law. He received the enthusiastic support of civil society and human rights groups, journalists, lawyers, and other professional organizations, and even members of the political opposition.
A typical civil society response came from the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights and the Human Rights Association for the Assistance of Prisoners. They wrote the Prime Minister that they “consider the termination of the state of emergency by the Egyptian authorities as a step forward towards the respect of Human Rights in Egypt and the strengthening of democratic values in the country. The extension of the state of emergency in Egypt had has been the source of several violations of human rights, and was used by the authorities to repress political opponents and to severely limit the freedom of expression and association.”
The organizations also encouraged the government to consider the demands of the Egyptian Press Syndicate and to examine journalists’ demands for the reform of laws governing the press. In particular, the groups expressed concern about the clauses on defamation, “so as to decriminalize the press related offences in order to guarantee freedom of expression and democracy in the country”.
Two journalists were recently sentenced to a year of imprisonment and fines for “defamation”, and hundreds of similar cases are reportedly now before the courts.
But the organizations cautioned the Egyptian authorities “to ensure the conformity of the new legislation to their international obligations” with guarantees of the right to life, freedom of expression, religion and belief, prohibition of torture and any form of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, the right to a fair and impartial trial, guarantees on the presumption of innocence, arrest only in case of reasonable suspicion, as well as the obligation to communicate to the detainee the charges against him/her and the guarantee of access to a lawyer, absolute prohibition of torture in all circumstances and a legal definition of terrorism that does not leave ground for misinterpretation or abuse..”
The Egyptian president’s response was to push a two-year extension of the emergency law through Parliament. The two-year extension was widely supported by the majority of the members of parliament who belong to Mubarak's governing National Democratic Party, which voted 237 to 91 in favor.
The largest opposition block in Parliament includes 88 members of the Muslim Brotherhood who were elected as independents last year. They stood in the parliamentary chamber today wearing black sashes over their shoulders that called for an end to the emergency law. The once militant Brotherhood, while still officially banned, has become Egypt’s leading voice of political Islam.
We will never use the emergency law against the Egyptian people," Mr. Nazif
said to the crowded parliamentary chamber. "We will use it only to protect the
citizens and face the terror cells that did not quell until now."
The authorities promptly arrested several dozen young men from political
opposition groups who had been displaying signs reading, "No for emergency
law," and "Together against extension of the emergency law."
While the U.S. State Department expressed disappointment that the presidential and subsequent parliamentary elections were not as free and fair as hoped for, President Bush has praised Egypt for its staunch support for the Global War on Terror.
Today, Egypt remains second only to Israel as a beneficiary of U.S. military and economic assistance.
President Bush has also praised other countries that have long histories as human rights violators but that support his anti-terror campaign. These include Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Libya, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Yemen, and others.
These countries consistently receive negative assessments in the U.S. State Department’s annual review of human rights practices around the world.
In a second kind of alliance that appears to be contrary to President Bush’s goal of spreading democracy around the world, the Administration is now reaching out to leaders who rule oil-rich countries that are accused of authoritarian rule and human rights violations. This search for energy supplies and allies against Iran includes Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Equatorial Guinea.
So opaque is the Bush Administration that it’s difficult to know if it understands how its policies thus contradict one another. And how seriously these contradictions strain American credibility internationally. But these conflicting themes will not be lost on the rest of the world, most of whose countries will lose no time pointing them out.
Sunday, April 30, 2006
REARRANGING THE DECK CHAIRS?
By William Fisher
So, after seven months and 21 separate post-Katrina hearings, testimony from close to 400 witnesses, and review of more than 800,000 documents, the Senators have thrown up their hands in frustration and disbelief and called for the abolition of FEMA - the Federal Emergency Management Agency -- and its resurrection under a new name.
Sens. Susan Collins and Joe Lieberman, respectively the top Republican and the ranking Democrat on the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Reform, predictably found "failings" at all levels of government in dealing with Hurricane Katrina, before, during and after the storm hit the Gulf Coast.
The Committee made more than 80 recommendations to begin to solve FEMA's problems. These recommendations concluded that FEMA is "a shambles" crippled beyond repair by years of poor leadership and inadequate funding and called for a new agency - the National Preparedness and Response Authority - to plan and carry out relief missions for domestic disasters.
The new authority would communicate directly with the president during major crises, and any dramatic cuts to budget or staffing levels would have to be approved by Congress. But it would remain within the Homeland Security Department and would continue receiving resources from that department.
Unfortunately, in "gotcha" Washington, what should have been a serious discussion about how to fix FEMA has degenerated into a partisan - and uninformed - debate about whether FEMA should remain part of the DHS or return to its former place as a Cabinet-level independent agency reporting directly to the President.
But that is a faux argument. It is largely irrelevant. The challenges facing both FEMA and DHS involve issues so fundamental that no amount of box-shifting has the slightest chance of fixing the problems. The main issue is not where the boxes are located, but who is in the boxes.
In case you've forgotten, FEMA has been around a long time. It was created by President Jimmy Carter way back in 1979, and by all accounts, it was just as dysfunctional then as now.
During the Reagan years, it was considered largely a weapon in the cold war. It morphed from dealing with natural disasters to planning for nuclear attacks.
In the early 1990's, FEMA's reputation was as bad as it is today. It was a dumping ground for political cronies, headed by a man whose only apparent qualification for the job was that he was a close friend of the first President Bush's chief of staff.
The agency's pitifully inadequate performance during Hurricane Andrew in 1992 should have told us a lot about how it would handle a Katrina-size calamity. For the first three post-Andrew days, the agency was absent. When it arrived, it was clueless about what to do.
But then President Bill Clinton has a unique idea: fix the problem by recruiting experienced leadership. Clinton appointed a seasoned disaster management professional, James Lee Witt, to head FEMA, which he elevated to cabinet rank.
Witt reorganized the office from top to bottom, producing immediate results. And even Clinton's harshest critics - including candidate George W. Bush in the 2000 presidential campaign -- praised the agency's performance.
What Clinton did is exactly opposite to what President George W. Bush has done
When Bush took office, he set out to replace FEMA's experienced staff with political cronies. His choice for director was his campaign manager, Joseph Allbaugh, who had no experience in emergency management. Veteran staffers were demoralized. Qualified personnel began leaving.
Allbaugh hired his college pal Michael Brown as FEMA's general counsel and then promoted him to deputy director. And when Allbaugh left to join the army of Washington lobbyists, he recommended Brown for the top job, despite his lack of any experience whatever in emergency management. Bush appointed him and, aside from the Katrina debacle ("You're doing a heck of a job, Brownie"), he will be best remembered for passing out FEMA checks to people whose homes weren't damaged in heavily Republican districts in Florida before the last election.
Then came the terrorist attacks of September 11th 2001, and the president felt the urgent need to be seen to be taking action. He created a new White House office of Homeland Security. To head this key post, he appointed former Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge, another "friend of Bush". Gov. Ridge, an affable politician, had zero experience in either counter-terrorism or disaster management.
When the behemoth Department of Security was created in 2002 - over the objections of the president -- Ridge was named to head it. Under his command were 22 different government agencies, as many different corporate cultures, and more than 183,000 employees. FEMA was one of the agencies absorbed by the new DHS.
But, as Eric Klinenberg and Thomas Frank wrote in Rolling Stone, "the real damage" began when Bush folded FEMA into the sprawling new Department of Homeland Security." With the department's focus almost exclusively on terrorism, disaster experts and emergency managers found themselves excluded from planning sessions. Military and law-enforcement personnel dominated DHS, imposing a top-down structure built on secrecy and skepticism, which clashed with FEMA's primary function of collaborating with regional agencies in an environment of shared information and mutual trust."
They point out that the cronyism that gave us Tom Ridge as the first secretary of Homeland Security quickly extended to the Bush Administration's buddies in the corporate community." The department's first advisory council was filled by corporate CEOs, many from industries positioned to profit from homeland-security projects.
DHS outsourced billions to private sector contractors, many on a no-bid basis.
With enthusiastic help from the Congressional pork barrel, a substantial part of DHS's funding was wasted on programs that rewarded "red states" and treated Wyoming and New York as if they faced equal threats of terrorism.
Issues that the 9/11 Commission identified as being critically important were neglected. The result, as we saw during Katrina, was that five years after the 2001 terrorist attacks, Louisiana - and most other states - still lacked the interoperable radio systems to allow first responders to communicate with one another.
Other parts of DHS were equally wasteful. The Transportation Safety Administration (TSA) spent billions fighting yesterday's wars by snatching nail clippers from airline passengers while largely ignoring, for example, port security.
And before the flood waters had receded from New Orleans, the president gave us added confirmation that cronyism was still alive and well by nominating the niece of the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, to head the DHS's Immigration and Customs Enforcement operation (ICE). ICE and its predecessor agencies have always been seen as wildly dysfunctional. Now the president put its 20,000 employees and $4 billion budget in the hands of an appointee with no expertise in the field.
Running DHS was always going to be an extremely difficult job. Running it without world-class leadership was unarguably an impossible job. Here was a monster that cried out for the talents of a Jack Welch, who brilliantly managed a similarly huge and varied enterprise known as the General Electric Company. Instead, it got a party political crony named Tom Ridge.
Ridge will probably best be remembered as the man who brought us the highly informative terrorist threat color-codes - that many charge he used to exploit terrorist fears by creating fake red alerts.
When Ridge left after the 2004 election, the President first named former New York City Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik, a tough-talking cop who was a partner in former Mayor Rudy Giuliani's private security firm. But Kerik, it was soon revealed, had forgotten to pay his "nanny-tax" and his name was withdrawn. The nod then went to Michael Chertoff, a former federal prosecutor who had headed John Ashcroft's Criminal Division in the Department of Justice before Bush nominated him to be a Federal Judge.
I'm sure Secretary Chertoff is a very smart guy, but like his predecessor, he has zero experience in managing anything larger than a few Justice Department hundred lawyers and support staff.
Six months after his confirmation, the unthinkable happened: DHS and FEMA had to demonstrate their ability to deal with a catastrophic natural disaster: Katrina. And we are all too familiar with how that turned out.
But the DHS and FEMA were not alone in abdicating responsibility; Congress bears a large share of the blame. DHS was obliged to report to dozens of different congressional committees because Congress refused to reorganize its oversight, the same way it did during the consolidation of the intelligence community.
What so many congressional committees did with so many hours of testimony is near nothing. Members protected their turf, ignoring the many critical reports from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) and the failing grades contained in the 9/11 Commission's "report card".
Congresspersons made lots of speeches and did a lot of showboating. Republicans led the cheerleading and counseled patience while Democrats hot-dogged dire warnings. In the end - until Katrina - neither party exercised any meaningful oversight. So the cronyism and wasteful spending continued - and continues today.
Post-Katrina, both the House and Senate conducted serious and valuable investigations. But in my view, the Senate reached the wrong conclusion.
Arguably, it might be marginally easier to fix the much smaller FEMA if it was no longer part of DHS - if the Administration is able - and has the political will -- to hire another James Lee Witt, regardless of his or her party affiliation, and give a new leader the resources needed to get the job done. Based on its current unsuccessful recruiting campaign, that prospect doesn't seem very promising. Top professionals in disaster management appear reluctant to become cogs in the DHS machinery.
But whether FEMA is cut loose from DHS or not is not likely to make a significant difference in the performance of either agency. Both will continue to fail until they undertake the fundamental strategic, tactical and managerial reforms they should have begun to address three years ago.
Both agencies need to replace political cronies with highly qualified and motivated leaders and employees - and that requires the cooperation and support of the president. Both need to make large and continuing investments in human capital. Both require improved clarity of mission. Both need to better understand and anticipate impacts of massive government reorganization on the other departments and agencies they need to depend on to be "force multipliers" as they carry out their tasks. Both need to adopt a decision-making process that is clear and transparent to outsiders. Both need to develop strategic plans that have measurable goals and benchmarks to assess progress and correct deficiencies. Both need to build accountability for individuals into their performance evaluations. Both need to develop rapid-response capability. Both need to build more effective relations with state and local agencies. Both need complete independence from the political centers in the Administration. Both need adequate financial resources, allocated according to need and not party politics. And both desperately require real Congressional oversight.
None of this is going to be easy. It is instructive to recall that President Harry Truman's proposals to coordinate the activities of the military services were initially considered by Congress in 1944. His objective was to reduce the inter-service rivalries believed to have reduced military effectiveness during World War II. But the Senate did not confirm James V. Forrestal as the first Secretary of Defense until three years later, waited another two years before giving him needed authority over the Army, Navy and Air Force, and thus opened the door to the "jointness" of the current Department of Defense (DOD).
And that job is still a work in progress, far from complete. The DOD's annual budget is roughly $425 billion, not including the tens of billions more in supplemental expenditures allotted by Congress throughout the year. And, all these years later, it is still the most avid dispenser of huge, often no-bid contracts and the government's most profligate waster of taxpayer money. It has never been able to pass any of the annual audits carried out by its own accountants. Its own Inspector General reports that it has not and will not be able to account for $1.1 trillion of "undocumentable adjustments."
So, with both FEMA and DHS, a measure of patience is required. Change threatens vested interests and is always resisted. It is at this nexus of transformation versus the status quo that presidential leadership is most critical. And we may well have to wait for another president to muster the political will to take it on. Hurricanes, floods and terrorist attacks, however, won't wait.
But clearly the debate is far broader than where to put FEMA, because what ails FEMA also ails the DHS.
So, after seven months and 21 separate post-Katrina hearings, testimony from close to 400 witnesses, and review of more than 800,000 documents, the Senators have thrown up their hands in frustration and disbelief and called for the abolition of FEMA - the Federal Emergency Management Agency -- and its resurrection under a new name.
Sens. Susan Collins and Joe Lieberman, respectively the top Republican and the ranking Democrat on the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Reform, predictably found "failings" at all levels of government in dealing with Hurricane Katrina, before, during and after the storm hit the Gulf Coast.
The Committee made more than 80 recommendations to begin to solve FEMA's problems. These recommendations concluded that FEMA is "a shambles" crippled beyond repair by years of poor leadership and inadequate funding and called for a new agency - the National Preparedness and Response Authority - to plan and carry out relief missions for domestic disasters.
The new authority would communicate directly with the president during major crises, and any dramatic cuts to budget or staffing levels would have to be approved by Congress. But it would remain within the Homeland Security Department and would continue receiving resources from that department.
Unfortunately, in "gotcha" Washington, what should have been a serious discussion about how to fix FEMA has degenerated into a partisan - and uninformed - debate about whether FEMA should remain part of the DHS or return to its former place as a Cabinet-level independent agency reporting directly to the President.
But that is a faux argument. It is largely irrelevant. The challenges facing both FEMA and DHS involve issues so fundamental that no amount of box-shifting has the slightest chance of fixing the problems. The main issue is not where the boxes are located, but who is in the boxes.
In case you've forgotten, FEMA has been around a long time. It was created by President Jimmy Carter way back in 1979, and by all accounts, it was just as dysfunctional then as now.
During the Reagan years, it was considered largely a weapon in the cold war. It morphed from dealing with natural disasters to planning for nuclear attacks.
In the early 1990's, FEMA's reputation was as bad as it is today. It was a dumping ground for political cronies, headed by a man whose only apparent qualification for the job was that he was a close friend of the first President Bush's chief of staff.
The agency's pitifully inadequate performance during Hurricane Andrew in 1992 should have told us a lot about how it would handle a Katrina-size calamity. For the first three post-Andrew days, the agency was absent. When it arrived, it was clueless about what to do.
But then President Bill Clinton has a unique idea: fix the problem by recruiting experienced leadership. Clinton appointed a seasoned disaster management professional, James Lee Witt, to head FEMA, which he elevated to cabinet rank.
Witt reorganized the office from top to bottom, producing immediate results. And even Clinton's harshest critics - including candidate George W. Bush in the 2000 presidential campaign -- praised the agency's performance.
What Clinton did is exactly opposite to what President George W. Bush has done
When Bush took office, he set out to replace FEMA's experienced staff with political cronies. His choice for director was his campaign manager, Joseph Allbaugh, who had no experience in emergency management. Veteran staffers were demoralized. Qualified personnel began leaving.
Allbaugh hired his college pal Michael Brown as FEMA's general counsel and then promoted him to deputy director. And when Allbaugh left to join the army of Washington lobbyists, he recommended Brown for the top job, despite his lack of any experience whatever in emergency management. Bush appointed him and, aside from the Katrina debacle ("You're doing a heck of a job, Brownie"), he will be best remembered for passing out FEMA checks to people whose homes weren't damaged in heavily Republican districts in Florida before the last election.
Then came the terrorist attacks of September 11th 2001, and the president felt the urgent need to be seen to be taking action. He created a new White House office of Homeland Security. To head this key post, he appointed former Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge, another "friend of Bush". Gov. Ridge, an affable politician, had zero experience in either counter-terrorism or disaster management.
When the behemoth Department of Security was created in 2002 - over the objections of the president -- Ridge was named to head it. Under his command were 22 different government agencies, as many different corporate cultures, and more than 183,000 employees. FEMA was one of the agencies absorbed by the new DHS.
But, as Eric Klinenberg and Thomas Frank wrote in Rolling Stone, "the real damage" began when Bush folded FEMA into the sprawling new Department of Homeland Security." With the department's focus almost exclusively on terrorism, disaster experts and emergency managers found themselves excluded from planning sessions. Military and law-enforcement personnel dominated DHS, imposing a top-down structure built on secrecy and skepticism, which clashed with FEMA's primary function of collaborating with regional agencies in an environment of shared information and mutual trust."
They point out that the cronyism that gave us Tom Ridge as the first secretary of Homeland Security quickly extended to the Bush Administration's buddies in the corporate community." The department's first advisory council was filled by corporate CEOs, many from industries positioned to profit from homeland-security projects.
DHS outsourced billions to private sector contractors, many on a no-bid basis.
With enthusiastic help from the Congressional pork barrel, a substantial part of DHS's funding was wasted on programs that rewarded "red states" and treated Wyoming and New York as if they faced equal threats of terrorism.
Issues that the 9/11 Commission identified as being critically important were neglected. The result, as we saw during Katrina, was that five years after the 2001 terrorist attacks, Louisiana - and most other states - still lacked the interoperable radio systems to allow first responders to communicate with one another.
Other parts of DHS were equally wasteful. The Transportation Safety Administration (TSA) spent billions fighting yesterday's wars by snatching nail clippers from airline passengers while largely ignoring, for example, port security.
And before the flood waters had receded from New Orleans, the president gave us added confirmation that cronyism was still alive and well by nominating the niece of the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, to head the DHS's Immigration and Customs Enforcement operation (ICE). ICE and its predecessor agencies have always been seen as wildly dysfunctional. Now the president put its 20,000 employees and $4 billion budget in the hands of an appointee with no expertise in the field.
Running DHS was always going to be an extremely difficult job. Running it without world-class leadership was unarguably an impossible job. Here was a monster that cried out for the talents of a Jack Welch, who brilliantly managed a similarly huge and varied enterprise known as the General Electric Company. Instead, it got a party political crony named Tom Ridge.
Ridge will probably best be remembered as the man who brought us the highly informative terrorist threat color-codes - that many charge he used to exploit terrorist fears by creating fake red alerts.
When Ridge left after the 2004 election, the President first named former New York City Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik, a tough-talking cop who was a partner in former Mayor Rudy Giuliani's private security firm. But Kerik, it was soon revealed, had forgotten to pay his "nanny-tax" and his name was withdrawn. The nod then went to Michael Chertoff, a former federal prosecutor who had headed John Ashcroft's Criminal Division in the Department of Justice before Bush nominated him to be a Federal Judge.
I'm sure Secretary Chertoff is a very smart guy, but like his predecessor, he has zero experience in managing anything larger than a few Justice Department hundred lawyers and support staff.
Six months after his confirmation, the unthinkable happened: DHS and FEMA had to demonstrate their ability to deal with a catastrophic natural disaster: Katrina. And we are all too familiar with how that turned out.
But the DHS and FEMA were not alone in abdicating responsibility; Congress bears a large share of the blame. DHS was obliged to report to dozens of different congressional committees because Congress refused to reorganize its oversight, the same way it did during the consolidation of the intelligence community.
What so many congressional committees did with so many hours of testimony is near nothing. Members protected their turf, ignoring the many critical reports from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) and the failing grades contained in the 9/11 Commission's "report card".
Congresspersons made lots of speeches and did a lot of showboating. Republicans led the cheerleading and counseled patience while Democrats hot-dogged dire warnings. In the end - until Katrina - neither party exercised any meaningful oversight. So the cronyism and wasteful spending continued - and continues today.
Post-Katrina, both the House and Senate conducted serious and valuable investigations. But in my view, the Senate reached the wrong conclusion.
Arguably, it might be marginally easier to fix the much smaller FEMA if it was no longer part of DHS - if the Administration is able - and has the political will -- to hire another James Lee Witt, regardless of his or her party affiliation, and give a new leader the resources needed to get the job done. Based on its current unsuccessful recruiting campaign, that prospect doesn't seem very promising. Top professionals in disaster management appear reluctant to become cogs in the DHS machinery.
But whether FEMA is cut loose from DHS or not is not likely to make a significant difference in the performance of either agency. Both will continue to fail until they undertake the fundamental strategic, tactical and managerial reforms they should have begun to address three years ago.
Both agencies need to replace political cronies with highly qualified and motivated leaders and employees - and that requires the cooperation and support of the president. Both need to make large and continuing investments in human capital. Both require improved clarity of mission. Both need to better understand and anticipate impacts of massive government reorganization on the other departments and agencies they need to depend on to be "force multipliers" as they carry out their tasks. Both need to adopt a decision-making process that is clear and transparent to outsiders. Both need to develop strategic plans that have measurable goals and benchmarks to assess progress and correct deficiencies. Both need to build accountability for individuals into their performance evaluations. Both need to develop rapid-response capability. Both need to build more effective relations with state and local agencies. Both need complete independence from the political centers in the Administration. Both need adequate financial resources, allocated according to need and not party politics. And both desperately require real Congressional oversight.
None of this is going to be easy. It is instructive to recall that President Harry Truman's proposals to coordinate the activities of the military services were initially considered by Congress in 1944. His objective was to reduce the inter-service rivalries believed to have reduced military effectiveness during World War II. But the Senate did not confirm James V. Forrestal as the first Secretary of Defense until three years later, waited another two years before giving him needed authority over the Army, Navy and Air Force, and thus opened the door to the "jointness" of the current Department of Defense (DOD).
And that job is still a work in progress, far from complete. The DOD's annual budget is roughly $425 billion, not including the tens of billions more in supplemental expenditures allotted by Congress throughout the year. And, all these years later, it is still the most avid dispenser of huge, often no-bid contracts and the government's most profligate waster of taxpayer money. It has never been able to pass any of the annual audits carried out by its own accountants. Its own Inspector General reports that it has not and will not be able to account for $1.1 trillion of "undocumentable adjustments."
So, with both FEMA and DHS, a measure of patience is required. Change threatens vested interests and is always resisted. It is at this nexus of transformation versus the status quo that presidential leadership is most critical. And we may well have to wait for another president to muster the political will to take it on. Hurricanes, floods and terrorist attacks, however, won't wait.
But clearly the debate is far broader than where to put FEMA, because what ails FEMA also ails the DHS.
Friday, April 28, 2006
WE CAN ALL AGREE ON THIS, RIGHT?
By William Fisher
In the unlikely event that our senators and congresspersons come together to pass an immigration bill sometime in this century, it is virtually certain to overlook a heartbreakingly simple humanitarian issue: battered women seeking asylum.
This is far from a new issue. It has been kicking around for years - and it has been kicked around for years.
Kicked from the old Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) to the U.S. Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services (BCIS) within the wildly dysfunctional Department of Homeland Security. And to compound this bureaucratic nightmare, BCIS now shares jurisdiction with the Justice Department (DOJ) for preparation of new guidelines that would cover this category of asylum seeker.
Rewind to 1995, when the INS actually produced some acceptable guidelines concerning women's issues. There was only one problem: the INS failed to follow its own guidelines.
That little lapse resulted in the bizarre case of Rodi Alvarado, a Guatemalan woman who was subjected to extreme domestic violence by her husband, who broke her jaw, kicked her when she was pregnant, wielded a machete and threatened that if she tried to escape he would leave her wheelchair bound for the rest of her life.
In 1995, Mrs. Alvarado did escape -- to the United States, which granted her asylum. But this decision was immediately appealed by the INS and overturned by the Justice Department's Board of Immigration Appeals in 1999.
The Board claimed she was not seeking asylum due to membership in a social group, political opinion, race, religion or nationality. They claimed she needed to show a nexus between the beatings and her political opinion or membership in a social group.
She was allowed to remain in the U.S. pending an appeal of the appeal. And she's still here, living in California and working in a convent.
Near the end of the Clinton Administration, Attorney General Janet Reno proposed regulations to expand the ability of victims of domestic violence (and other gender-related human rights abuses like trafficking, sexual slavery and honor killing) to seek asylum in the United States.
But those regulations were never implemented. And when John Ashcroft became attorney general, he failed to recommend that the regulations be adopted. Instead, he re-certified Ms. Alvarado's case to himself in order to review it, since the Attorney General has authority to make decisions on any immigration case.
But Ashcroft left office in 2004 without making a decision. He said the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security should agree on a set of guidelines covering women's issues, including domestic violence.
Since then, both agencies continue to claim they are working on these guidelines. Despite the fact that proposed regulations were drawn up back in December 2000, nothing has been finalized in more than five years.
According to Rodi Alvarado's lawyer, Karen Musalo of the University of California's Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco, "The complication, as we understand it, is that now both DHS and DOJ have jurisdiction over the regulations because of the reorganization of the INS, and there has not been consensus between the two agencies on how to proceed."
One has to wonder about how hard these two taxpayer-funded behemoths are working to solve the problem.
Meantime, Mrs. Alvarado - and others in her predicament - remains in legal limbo.
The current immigration debate has rekindled interest in cases like that of Mrs. Alvarado. But a coalition of refugee and human rights groups is taking a new approach: it is urging congress to examine the "root causes" of population movements.
Responding to the claim by some congresspersons that easing asylum restrictions would "open the floodgates" to still more undocumented aliens, a report by one of the members of the coalition, The Center for Gender and Refugee Studies at the University of California at Hastings, argues that "the solution is not to deny protection, but to look at the root causes of refugee flows, and to craft foreign policy responses to address them."
And it is taking its case not to immigration agencies but to a few key members of congress who, they hope, will help them to take their message to the State Department.
The reason they want State involved is that there is credible evidence that domestic violence is part of a larger and even more deadly phenomenon: Femicide. And the State Department is a major funder of programs to strengthen the judiciary and other rule of law institutions in Guatemala and elsewhere around the world.
For example, in Mrs. Alvarado's country, Guatemala, the coalition says "there is violence and murder of women with total impunity - with more than 2,200 women
killed since 2100, and perhaps 10 or 11 prosecutions and convictions. Local media has largely ignored the issue.
Femicide is also a problem elsewhere in Latin America. Earlier this year, Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, Mexico and Guatemala sent a delegation of activists to the
Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in Washington to focus attention on Femicide.
Incomplete murder rates presented to the Commission cite 373 known murders of women in Bolivia from 2003 to 2004, 143 in Peru during 2003, and more than 2,000 in Guatemala. In Colombia, a woman is reportedly killed every six days by her partner or ex-partner. Ciudad Juarez and Chihuahua City, Mexico, two cities where the Femicide trend was first widely noticed, have suffered the murder of more than 500 women from multiple causes since 1993, according to press and other sources. Dozens more remain missing.
Globally, the problem is no less severe. In many parts of South Asia and the Middle East, for example, so-called "honor killings" usually go unpunished.
Leading the Femicide campaign are four non-governmental organizations -- the Washington Office on Latin America, Amnesty International USA, the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies, and the Guatemalan Human Rights Commission.
Three members of congress - California Democrats Barbara Lee, Tom Lantos, and Hilda Solis - are drafting a letter to the State Department, which they hope will be signed by most of their colleagues, regardless of party. The letter will urge State to provide funding and personnel to examine the Femicide issue as well as the murder of human rights activists.
It would be tough to think of two issues less controversial than Femicide and asylum for battered women. They are not immigration issues - they are issues of compassion, justice and basic fairness. Congressmen like James Sensenbrenner and Tom Tancredo ought to be able to sign on in a heartbeat.
But, given the incredible rancor generated by the immigration issue, I'm not holding my breath.
In the unlikely event that our senators and congresspersons come together to pass an immigration bill sometime in this century, it is virtually certain to overlook a heartbreakingly simple humanitarian issue: battered women seeking asylum.
This is far from a new issue. It has been kicking around for years - and it has been kicked around for years.
Kicked from the old Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) to the U.S. Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services (BCIS) within the wildly dysfunctional Department of Homeland Security. And to compound this bureaucratic nightmare, BCIS now shares jurisdiction with the Justice Department (DOJ) for preparation of new guidelines that would cover this category of asylum seeker.
Rewind to 1995, when the INS actually produced some acceptable guidelines concerning women's issues. There was only one problem: the INS failed to follow its own guidelines.
That little lapse resulted in the bizarre case of Rodi Alvarado, a Guatemalan woman who was subjected to extreme domestic violence by her husband, who broke her jaw, kicked her when she was pregnant, wielded a machete and threatened that if she tried to escape he would leave her wheelchair bound for the rest of her life.
In 1995, Mrs. Alvarado did escape -- to the United States, which granted her asylum. But this decision was immediately appealed by the INS and overturned by the Justice Department's Board of Immigration Appeals in 1999.
The Board claimed she was not seeking asylum due to membership in a social group, political opinion, race, religion or nationality. They claimed she needed to show a nexus between the beatings and her political opinion or membership in a social group.
She was allowed to remain in the U.S. pending an appeal of the appeal. And she's still here, living in California and working in a convent.
Near the end of the Clinton Administration, Attorney General Janet Reno proposed regulations to expand the ability of victims of domestic violence (and other gender-related human rights abuses like trafficking, sexual slavery and honor killing) to seek asylum in the United States.
But those regulations were never implemented. And when John Ashcroft became attorney general, he failed to recommend that the regulations be adopted. Instead, he re-certified Ms. Alvarado's case to himself in order to review it, since the Attorney General has authority to make decisions on any immigration case.
But Ashcroft left office in 2004 without making a decision. He said the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security should agree on a set of guidelines covering women's issues, including domestic violence.
Since then, both agencies continue to claim they are working on these guidelines. Despite the fact that proposed regulations were drawn up back in December 2000, nothing has been finalized in more than five years.
According to Rodi Alvarado's lawyer, Karen Musalo of the University of California's Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco, "The complication, as we understand it, is that now both DHS and DOJ have jurisdiction over the regulations because of the reorganization of the INS, and there has not been consensus between the two agencies on how to proceed."
One has to wonder about how hard these two taxpayer-funded behemoths are working to solve the problem.
Meantime, Mrs. Alvarado - and others in her predicament - remains in legal limbo.
The current immigration debate has rekindled interest in cases like that of Mrs. Alvarado. But a coalition of refugee and human rights groups is taking a new approach: it is urging congress to examine the "root causes" of population movements.
Responding to the claim by some congresspersons that easing asylum restrictions would "open the floodgates" to still more undocumented aliens, a report by one of the members of the coalition, The Center for Gender and Refugee Studies at the University of California at Hastings, argues that "the solution is not to deny protection, but to look at the root causes of refugee flows, and to craft foreign policy responses to address them."
And it is taking its case not to immigration agencies but to a few key members of congress who, they hope, will help them to take their message to the State Department.
The reason they want State involved is that there is credible evidence that domestic violence is part of a larger and even more deadly phenomenon: Femicide. And the State Department is a major funder of programs to strengthen the judiciary and other rule of law institutions in Guatemala and elsewhere around the world.
For example, in Mrs. Alvarado's country, Guatemala, the coalition says "there is violence and murder of women with total impunity - with more than 2,200 women
killed since 2100, and perhaps 10 or 11 prosecutions and convictions. Local media has largely ignored the issue.
Femicide is also a problem elsewhere in Latin America. Earlier this year, Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, Mexico and Guatemala sent a delegation of activists to the
Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in Washington to focus attention on Femicide.
Incomplete murder rates presented to the Commission cite 373 known murders of women in Bolivia from 2003 to 2004, 143 in Peru during 2003, and more than 2,000 in Guatemala. In Colombia, a woman is reportedly killed every six days by her partner or ex-partner. Ciudad Juarez and Chihuahua City, Mexico, two cities where the Femicide trend was first widely noticed, have suffered the murder of more than 500 women from multiple causes since 1993, according to press and other sources. Dozens more remain missing.
Globally, the problem is no less severe. In many parts of South Asia and the Middle East, for example, so-called "honor killings" usually go unpunished.
Leading the Femicide campaign are four non-governmental organizations -- the Washington Office on Latin America, Amnesty International USA, the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies, and the Guatemalan Human Rights Commission.
Three members of congress - California Democrats Barbara Lee, Tom Lantos, and Hilda Solis - are drafting a letter to the State Department, which they hope will be signed by most of their colleagues, regardless of party. The letter will urge State to provide funding and personnel to examine the Femicide issue as well as the murder of human rights activists.
It would be tough to think of two issues less controversial than Femicide and asylum for battered women. They are not immigration issues - they are issues of compassion, justice and basic fairness. Congressmen like James Sensenbrenner and Tom Tancredo ought to be able to sign on in a heartbeat.
But, given the incredible rancor generated by the immigration issue, I'm not holding my breath.
“THE WORST OF THE WORST”
By William Fisher
In 2002, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld famously referred to Guantanamo prisoners as “the worst of the worst”.
As recently as June 2005, he said, despite massive and incontrovertible evidence to the contrary, "If you think of the people down there, these are people, all of whom were captured on a battlefield. They're terrorists, trainers, bomb makers, recruiters, financiers, [Osama bin Laden's] bodyguards, would-be suicide bombers, probably the 20th 9/11 hijacker."
And Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, chimed in, “They were so vicious, if given the chance they would gnaw through the hydraulic lines of a C-17 while they were being flown to Cuba.”
"These are the people that don't know any moral values," he said, adding that
” the threat they pose is real -- at least 12 former detainees have been killed or captured on the battlefield after their release.”
If that be true, how do we explain why, of the approximately 760 prisoners brought to Guantanamo since 2002, the military has previously released 180 and transferred 76 to the custody of other countries.
Or why it is now proposing to release 141 more prisoners -- about a third of those still left at GITMO? Have they been rehabilitated?
No, the Pentagon says they no longer have any further intelligence value.
So they were “the worst of the worst”, but they have now told us everything we wanted to know, so we are letting them go, presumably to terrorize us another day?
Or is it that the military doesn’t have enough on these people to try them, even before its own tribunals, which have a much lower threshold of evidence than our courts?
Or is it that it we are planning to turn some of these released prisoners over to law enforcement authorities in their home countries? A kind of slightly more transparent rendition.
Or is it that the military simply can’t abide the idea of admitting that it, too, makes mistakes?
There may be some truth in all of the above. Yet, the Bush Administration seems hell-bent on continuing to shoot itself in the foot by clinging to the fading perception of its own hundred per cent righteousness.
Many of the Pentagon’s “mistakes” have been held for close to five years, without charges and without trials. Some were not captured on the battlefields of Afghanistan, but kidnapped off the streets of Europe and various locations in the Middle East. Many were “sold” to U.S. authorities in Afghanistan and Pakistan for bounties. It is clear that many others were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.
In a brilliant piece of investigative journalism, the fiercely nonpartisan National Journal magazine reported, “Notwithstanding Rumsfeld's description, the majority of (Guantanamo prisoners) was not caught by American soldiers on the battlefield. They came into American custody from third parties, mostly from Pakistan, some after targeted raids there, most after a dragnet for Arabs after 9/11.”
Nevertheless, all were categorized as “enemy combatants” with ties to the Taliban, Al Qaeda, or other groups that support terrorism. The Pentagon undoubtedly has evidence that some of the prisoners at Guantanamo were Al-Qaeda operatives out to kill as many Americans as possible. But in many other cases, the “evidence” is based on second, third and fourth-hand hearsay. In still others, it is clear that admissions of guilt have been obtained through cruel and inhumane interrogations that many say amount to torture.
Examples of Pentagon mistakes are not difficult to find. For example:
There is a man named Saddiq who has been behind razor wire for more than four years. In a rare display of candor, the military acknowledged last year
that he was not an enemy combatant. But he remains imprisoned. His lawyer says his opposition to Osama bin Laden makes him too hot to handle in his native Saudi Arabia.
Then there are the Chinese Uighur Muslims who had fled persecution in China, some of who are still being held at Guantanamo, officially because they would not be safe if returned to their native country.
Then there are the “Bosnian Six” -- six Algerians seized in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 2002 and flown to Guantanamo after the Bosnian Supreme Court dismissed charges against them of plotting to blow up the U.S. Embassy in Sarajevo.
Said one of them: "I've been here for three years and these accusations were just told to me…Nobody or any interrogator ever mentioned any of these accusations you are talking about now. Not even one mentioned the embassy thing, the terrorist organization, the Algerian Islamic organization. It's weird how this just came up now."
Then there are at least three children, ages 13 to 15.
Then there is the Casio watch caper reported by the fiercely nonpartisan National Journal. According to the Defense Department’s own files, a watch worn by one prisoner was similar to another Casio model that has a circuit board that Al Qaeda used for making bombs. The United States is using the Qaeda-favored Casio wristwatch as evidence against at least nine detainees. But the offending model is sold in sidewalk stands around the world. And the detainee’s Casio model hasn't been manufactured for years.
Then there is Murat Kurnaz, a Turk the government plucked off a bus in Pakistan and subsequently accused of being friends with a suicide bomber. The government did not tell Kurnaz's tribunal that his friend is alive and therefore could not be the referenced suicide bomber. In January 2005, a federal judge singled out Kurnaz's case as evidence of the lack of due process in the Guantanamo tribunals. The judge said that his tribunal had ignored exculpatory evidence and relied instead on a single anonymous memo that was not credible.
Then there are the British men who were detained for nearly three years and who have sued the U.S. government, alleging torture and other human rights violations. In a 115-page dossier, the men allege that they were beaten, stripped, shackled and deprived of sleep during their detention. They charge that guards threw prisoners’ Korans into toilets and attempted to force them to give up their religious faith. There say detainees were forcibly injected with unidentified drugs and intimidated with military dogs. And they claim they were subjected to abuse and beatings during their detention.
Each said they eventually gave false confessions that they appeared in a video with al Qaida chief Osama bin Laden and Mohammed Atta, one of the September 11 hijackers, despite the fact that they could prove they were in Britain when the video was made.
After they were freed last March, the men were questioned by British police but quickly released without charge.
These are just a few of the Pentagon’s mistakes – much of the evidence coming from the Defense Department’s own files.
Not even the CIA bought into Rumsfeld’s “worst of the worst” riff. Michael Scheuer, who headed the agency's bin Laden unit through 1999 and resigned in 2004, said, ”By the fall of 2002, it was common knowledge around CIA circles that fewer than 10 percent of Guantanamo's prisoners were high-value terrorist operatives…Most of the men were probably foot soldiers at best” who were "going to know absolutely nothing about terrorism."
Presumably, these are the 141 prisoners now being released.
Those who remain will be judged through a legal process that most lawyers familiar with military prosecutions say ignores the due process protections found in, say, garden-variety courts martial.
But, if past is prologue, the Pentagon – and the President – will continue to defend the indefensible.
In 2002, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld famously referred to Guantanamo prisoners as “the worst of the worst”.
As recently as June 2005, he said, despite massive and incontrovertible evidence to the contrary, "If you think of the people down there, these are people, all of whom were captured on a battlefield. They're terrorists, trainers, bomb makers, recruiters, financiers, [Osama bin Laden's] bodyguards, would-be suicide bombers, probably the 20th 9/11 hijacker."
And Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, chimed in, “They were so vicious, if given the chance they would gnaw through the hydraulic lines of a C-17 while they were being flown to Cuba.”
"These are the people that don't know any moral values," he said, adding that
” the threat they pose is real -- at least 12 former detainees have been killed or captured on the battlefield after their release.”
If that be true, how do we explain why, of the approximately 760 prisoners brought to Guantanamo since 2002, the military has previously released 180 and transferred 76 to the custody of other countries.
Or why it is now proposing to release 141 more prisoners -- about a third of those still left at GITMO? Have they been rehabilitated?
No, the Pentagon says they no longer have any further intelligence value.
So they were “the worst of the worst”, but they have now told us everything we wanted to know, so we are letting them go, presumably to terrorize us another day?
Or is it that the military doesn’t have enough on these people to try them, even before its own tribunals, which have a much lower threshold of evidence than our courts?
Or is it that it we are planning to turn some of these released prisoners over to law enforcement authorities in their home countries? A kind of slightly more transparent rendition.
Or is it that the military simply can’t abide the idea of admitting that it, too, makes mistakes?
There may be some truth in all of the above. Yet, the Bush Administration seems hell-bent on continuing to shoot itself in the foot by clinging to the fading perception of its own hundred per cent righteousness.
Many of the Pentagon’s “mistakes” have been held for close to five years, without charges and without trials. Some were not captured on the battlefields of Afghanistan, but kidnapped off the streets of Europe and various locations in the Middle East. Many were “sold” to U.S. authorities in Afghanistan and Pakistan for bounties. It is clear that many others were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.
In a brilliant piece of investigative journalism, the fiercely nonpartisan National Journal magazine reported, “Notwithstanding Rumsfeld's description, the majority of (Guantanamo prisoners) was not caught by American soldiers on the battlefield. They came into American custody from third parties, mostly from Pakistan, some after targeted raids there, most after a dragnet for Arabs after 9/11.”
Nevertheless, all were categorized as “enemy combatants” with ties to the Taliban, Al Qaeda, or other groups that support terrorism. The Pentagon undoubtedly has evidence that some of the prisoners at Guantanamo were Al-Qaeda operatives out to kill as many Americans as possible. But in many other cases, the “evidence” is based on second, third and fourth-hand hearsay. In still others, it is clear that admissions of guilt have been obtained through cruel and inhumane interrogations that many say amount to torture.
Examples of Pentagon mistakes are not difficult to find. For example:
There is a man named Saddiq who has been behind razor wire for more than four years. In a rare display of candor, the military acknowledged last year
that he was not an enemy combatant. But he remains imprisoned. His lawyer says his opposition to Osama bin Laden makes him too hot to handle in his native Saudi Arabia.
Then there are the Chinese Uighur Muslims who had fled persecution in China, some of who are still being held at Guantanamo, officially because they would not be safe if returned to their native country.
Then there are the “Bosnian Six” -- six Algerians seized in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 2002 and flown to Guantanamo after the Bosnian Supreme Court dismissed charges against them of plotting to blow up the U.S. Embassy in Sarajevo.
Said one of them: "I've been here for three years and these accusations were just told to me…Nobody or any interrogator ever mentioned any of these accusations you are talking about now. Not even one mentioned the embassy thing, the terrorist organization, the Algerian Islamic organization. It's weird how this just came up now."
Then there are at least three children, ages 13 to 15.
Then there is the Casio watch caper reported by the fiercely nonpartisan National Journal. According to the Defense Department’s own files, a watch worn by one prisoner was similar to another Casio model that has a circuit board that Al Qaeda used for making bombs. The United States is using the Qaeda-favored Casio wristwatch as evidence against at least nine detainees. But the offending model is sold in sidewalk stands around the world. And the detainee’s Casio model hasn't been manufactured for years.
Then there is Murat Kurnaz, a Turk the government plucked off a bus in Pakistan and subsequently accused of being friends with a suicide bomber. The government did not tell Kurnaz's tribunal that his friend is alive and therefore could not be the referenced suicide bomber. In January 2005, a federal judge singled out Kurnaz's case as evidence of the lack of due process in the Guantanamo tribunals. The judge said that his tribunal had ignored exculpatory evidence and relied instead on a single anonymous memo that was not credible.
Then there are the British men who were detained for nearly three years and who have sued the U.S. government, alleging torture and other human rights violations. In a 115-page dossier, the men allege that they were beaten, stripped, shackled and deprived of sleep during their detention. They charge that guards threw prisoners’ Korans into toilets and attempted to force them to give up their religious faith. There say detainees were forcibly injected with unidentified drugs and intimidated with military dogs. And they claim they were subjected to abuse and beatings during their detention.
Each said they eventually gave false confessions that they appeared in a video with al Qaida chief Osama bin Laden and Mohammed Atta, one of the September 11 hijackers, despite the fact that they could prove they were in Britain when the video was made.
After they were freed last March, the men were questioned by British police but quickly released without charge.
These are just a few of the Pentagon’s mistakes – much of the evidence coming from the Defense Department’s own files.
Not even the CIA bought into Rumsfeld’s “worst of the worst” riff. Michael Scheuer, who headed the agency's bin Laden unit through 1999 and resigned in 2004, said, ”By the fall of 2002, it was common knowledge around CIA circles that fewer than 10 percent of Guantanamo's prisoners were high-value terrorist operatives…Most of the men were probably foot soldiers at best” who were "going to know absolutely nothing about terrorism."
Presumably, these are the 141 prisoners now being released.
Those who remain will be judged through a legal process that most lawyers familiar with military prosecutions say ignores the due process protections found in, say, garden-variety courts martial.
But, if past is prologue, the Pentagon – and the President – will continue to defend the indefensible.
Monday, April 24, 2006
Someone Does Not Mean Anyone
By William Fisher
The trial of Zakarias Moussaoui has all the makings of a soap opera. If Kafka wrote soap operas, that is.
Consider the cast of characters:
A defendant who alternately proclaimed his innocence and boasted of his guilt.
A prosecution that magnified the importance of a bit player in the 9/11 terrorist plot, and put the death penalty on the table despite charging him not with doing anything, but only with conspiring to do something.
A government that claimed that if only Moussaoui had not lied to the FBI, they could have prevented the attacks of 9/11, even though on 9/11 Moussaoui was in a Minnesota jail, while FBI headquarters was minimizing repeated alarms from its Minneapolis field office about Moussaoui's flight training.
A heart-wrenching chorus of survivors of 9/11 victims, unified in their view that the defendant was guilty of committing a crime, but divided about whether to exact retribution by executing him (thus conferring the martyrdom he says he welcomes), or jailing him for life (so that he will have to look in the mirror every morning and hate himself for the terror he wrought). Except that he didn't actually commit any act of terrorism. And, judging from his testimony, if he hated himself for anything it would be for not killing any American infidels.
Psychiatrists who painted the defendant as a paranoid schizophrenic, prompting some of us to label him "crazy" and others to decide he's "crazy as a fox."
A media that slavishly focused on the defendant's bizarre courtroom rantings and portrayed the trial as some kind of 21st century passion play about retribution vs. forgiveness, good vs. evil.
But there remains a major issue this trial has ignored. As lawyer David Cole wrote me, "There is something fundamentally wrong with trying to execute Moussaoui, an admittedly marginal figure who was not himself even involved in the planning of 9/11, when we have detained the mastermind of the attack, and the alleged 20th hijacker, but have brought no charges against them -- and probably never will, because our torture of them effectively immunizes them from prosecution."
The reputed mastermind of 9/11 is, of course, Khalid Shaikh Mohammad, who was arrested by the Pakistani government in a safehouse outside Islamabad in March 2003. President Bush characterized the arrest as "fantastic" evidence of the success of his crusade to bring the perpetrators of 9/11 to "justice", and immediately had Khalid whisked off to an undisclosed location in the custody of undisclosed persons who doubtless interrogated him using undisclosed techniques.
The so-called "20th hijacker" is said to be Mohammad al-Qahtani, who has been held in Guantanamo and is touted by the U.S. military as a major informant.
Moussaoui's trial heard from neither, because evidence obtained through torture would probably still be inadmissible in a U.S. court.
Moussaoui pleaded guilty to all the charges against him, though during the trial he denied that he was part of the 9/11 plan, but rather part of a separate plan to fly a plane into the White House. He signed his guilty plea "the 20th hijacker," implying that he was supposed to be on Flight 93, which had only four terrorists, and which crashed into a field in Pennsylvania. But Zakarias Moussaoui and Mohammad al-Qahtani can't both be the 20th hijacker.
Moreover, information garnered from Khalid Sheikh Muhammad portrays Moussaoui as a bit player, a fringe figure who was never in contact with the 9/11 hijackers.
In fact, on 9/11, Moussaoui was in a Minnesota jail. A month before the 9/11 attacks, Minnesota FBI agent Harry Samit warned his superiors that Moussaoui was dangerous, and that his flight training could be part of a terrorist plot. Samit told the Moussaoui jury he sent Washington about seventy fruitless warning messages about Moussaoui. And the 9/11 Commission concluded that the government had enough information to "join the dots."
So what has truly given this trial its Kafkaesque quality is that it is trial by proxy. It is a surrogate for the trials of those we'll never hear from, like Khalid Shaikh Mohammad and Mohammad al-Qahtani, and those who are still at large, like Osama Bin Laden.
Even among those who oppose capital punishment, it is not difficult to understand why America would want to punish someone for 9/11. But someone does not mean anyone.
If the jury votes to execute Zakarias Moussaoui, it will be elevating this bit player to above-the-marquee prominence, and he will be laughing all the way to Paradise.
The trial of Zakarias Moussaoui has all the makings of a soap opera. If Kafka wrote soap operas, that is.
Consider the cast of characters:
A defendant who alternately proclaimed his innocence and boasted of his guilt.
A prosecution that magnified the importance of a bit player in the 9/11 terrorist plot, and put the death penalty on the table despite charging him not with doing anything, but only with conspiring to do something.
A government that claimed that if only Moussaoui had not lied to the FBI, they could have prevented the attacks of 9/11, even though on 9/11 Moussaoui was in a Minnesota jail, while FBI headquarters was minimizing repeated alarms from its Minneapolis field office about Moussaoui's flight training.
A heart-wrenching chorus of survivors of 9/11 victims, unified in their view that the defendant was guilty of committing a crime, but divided about whether to exact retribution by executing him (thus conferring the martyrdom he says he welcomes), or jailing him for life (so that he will have to look in the mirror every morning and hate himself for the terror he wrought). Except that he didn't actually commit any act of terrorism. And, judging from his testimony, if he hated himself for anything it would be for not killing any American infidels.
Psychiatrists who painted the defendant as a paranoid schizophrenic, prompting some of us to label him "crazy" and others to decide he's "crazy as a fox."
A media that slavishly focused on the defendant's bizarre courtroom rantings and portrayed the trial as some kind of 21st century passion play about retribution vs. forgiveness, good vs. evil.
But there remains a major issue this trial has ignored. As lawyer David Cole wrote me, "There is something fundamentally wrong with trying to execute Moussaoui, an admittedly marginal figure who was not himself even involved in the planning of 9/11, when we have detained the mastermind of the attack, and the alleged 20th hijacker, but have brought no charges against them -- and probably never will, because our torture of them effectively immunizes them from prosecution."
The reputed mastermind of 9/11 is, of course, Khalid Shaikh Mohammad, who was arrested by the Pakistani government in a safehouse outside Islamabad in March 2003. President Bush characterized the arrest as "fantastic" evidence of the success of his crusade to bring the perpetrators of 9/11 to "justice", and immediately had Khalid whisked off to an undisclosed location in the custody of undisclosed persons who doubtless interrogated him using undisclosed techniques.
The so-called "20th hijacker" is said to be Mohammad al-Qahtani, who has been held in Guantanamo and is touted by the U.S. military as a major informant.
Moussaoui's trial heard from neither, because evidence obtained through torture would probably still be inadmissible in a U.S. court.
Moussaoui pleaded guilty to all the charges against him, though during the trial he denied that he was part of the 9/11 plan, but rather part of a separate plan to fly a plane into the White House. He signed his guilty plea "the 20th hijacker," implying that he was supposed to be on Flight 93, which had only four terrorists, and which crashed into a field in Pennsylvania. But Zakarias Moussaoui and Mohammad al-Qahtani can't both be the 20th hijacker.
Moreover, information garnered from Khalid Sheikh Muhammad portrays Moussaoui as a bit player, a fringe figure who was never in contact with the 9/11 hijackers.
In fact, on 9/11, Moussaoui was in a Minnesota jail. A month before the 9/11 attacks, Minnesota FBI agent Harry Samit warned his superiors that Moussaoui was dangerous, and that his flight training could be part of a terrorist plot. Samit told the Moussaoui jury he sent Washington about seventy fruitless warning messages about Moussaoui. And the 9/11 Commission concluded that the government had enough information to "join the dots."
So what has truly given this trial its Kafkaesque quality is that it is trial by proxy. It is a surrogate for the trials of those we'll never hear from, like Khalid Shaikh Mohammad and Mohammad al-Qahtani, and those who are still at large, like Osama Bin Laden.
Even among those who oppose capital punishment, it is not difficult to understand why America would want to punish someone for 9/11. But someone does not mean anyone.
If the jury votes to execute Zakarias Moussaoui, it will be elevating this bit player to above-the-marquee prominence, and he will be laughing all the way to Paradise.
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